


The Hogwarts Hustle

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Team Fortress 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, First Time, Heist, Humor, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-17 19:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15468033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: The year is 1973, and a pair of professors from the Durmstrang Institute arrive at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to study the Snargaluff plant—or at least that’s the cover story as Heavy and Medic help Spy infiltrate Hogwarts for reasons of their own.





	The Hogwarts Hustle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [graveExcitement (arachnids)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arachnids/gifts).



On December 15th of 1973, two visiting scholars arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a week of research. These were the facts as written in the school records (later erased in embarrassment), and they were more or less correct. Those who knew a little more about the affair were inclined to suspect that the scholars’ party in fact numbered more than two. Those who knew a lot more would argue that there had never been any scholars at all. 

“When the storm assails us,” Albus Dumbledore was saying, addressing seven hundred students who hung on his every word and another three hundred willing him to finish so that dinner might be served, “we are often found shuttering the windows and barring the door when we ought to be lighting a fire and inviting our friends around for a good meal.”

He paused for a well-timed smile. “But I ramble on about the weather when there are pigs in blankets on the table.”

There were seven hundred polite sniggers, plus a few dozen rueful additions from those who had been won over. 

“If you will be patient, we are waiting only on a few late arrivals before we—”

Here, the doors of the Great Hall flew open. 

Some students jumped and others gasped as a blast of cold air sent a flurry of snowflakes spiralling up the centre aisle. Those who had noticed the two extra chairs sitting empty between the headmaster and deputy headmistress’s congratulated themselves. A pair of ghosts murmured nostalgically on the subject of draughts and stiff breezes. At the head table, the staff wore smiles in various states of fixedness, although even the least generous among them would admit that Dumbledore employed his sense of drama in the name of preventing a magical school from ever becoming mundane. 

“Professor Vogel, Professor Malinov,” Dumbledore called out. He cast a twinkling glance of conspiracy at his audience before declaring, “You are precisely on time!”

The two men who strode into the Great Hall looked as though they had been blown in from another land’s winter. Their faces were unknown to all, something nearly unheard of in as small an enclave as wizarding Britain, and their snow-dusted clothes struck the watching eyes as foreign in both cut and embellishment. 

Professor Vogel—or the one widely presumed to be Vogel when he called out “Hallo, Herr Professor Dumbledore!” in a distinctly German accent—was a tall, broad-shouldered man in silver-rimmed spectacles and a scarlet cloak. His dark hair was greying at the temples, and he had the kind of face that might either be called square-jawed or equine depending on the beholder’s charity. As he marched up the aisle, his cloak swept itself back dramatically, revealing an elaborate suit of scholarly robes and a pair of gloves that for a startling moment gave the illusion of bloodied hands. 

Half a step behind, Professor Malinov was nearly half a foot taller than his companion and twice as broad. Only the comparative size of Rubeus Hagrid, the school’s assistant gamekeeper, stopped the word “giant” from crossing anyone’s mind. The next reasonable conclusion was “grizzly bear.” In fact, Malinov’s brown fur hat was made of something suspiciously coarser than sable, as was the trim on the coat he wore sashed beneath his sizeable stomach. He had trousers on, which raised a few eyebrows, and his boots curled up at the toe. 

Unlike Vogel, whose smile was baring altogether too much tooth, Malinov’s mouth was a humourless line beneath his hawkish nose. His steely gaze swept across room as if assessing each student as a possible threat and dismissing each in turn. The keen-eyed caught a glimpse of a green-and-black snake coiled around his wrist, and the keenest Potions students among them identified it as a boomslang, but the attention of the crowd was quickly diverted by the sound of desperately flapping wings.

“ _Archimedes, no!_ ” 

What proved to be a white pigeon burst forth from somewhere about Vogel’s person and sailed toward the head table. Vogel broke into a run, but the bird had too much of a lead. It came to a graceful landing on Professor Flitwick’s plate, cocked its head at the feast, and then promptly hopped into the open cavity of a roast goose. 

“Get out of there, Archimedes,” Vogel scolded, peering into the goose as the students erupted in laughter and Flitwick politely nudged his plate aside. “You don’t know where that thing has been!”

“Birds,” Dumbledore was heard to murmur in sympathy.

“Aheh.” Vogel thrust his hand into the goose and with some effort removed his grease-stained familiar. “My apologies.”

“Not at all,” Dumbledore replied, smiling benevolently as seats were found and Malinov mutely handed Vogel a handkerchief. When the laughter had died down, he continued his address. “I am very pleased to introduce Professors Vogel and Malinov—and Archimedes—who in the spirit of international friendship and our schools’ shared love of learning have joined us for the week from Durmstrang Institute. The professors are co-authoring a monograph on Snargaluff plants, and as Madam Pince would be happy to tell you were she here, the Hogwarts library is home to the wizarding world’s largest collection of works on tentacular botany.”

“As Mr. Potter and Mr. Black will attest,” he added, gesturing to two grinning boys seated on the Gryffindor side of the hall, “Hogwarts is also home to several fine examples of the plant itself. Very good to see you ambulatory again, Mr. Potter. I know you and your classmates will all help our guests feel at home while they are with us.”

There was a smattering of polite applause, which grew louder in the name of general boisterousness. Vogel bowed, while Malinov merely nodded.

“Now let us eat,” Dumbledore said. “I’ve heard excellent things about the goose.”

With that, the students descended upon their dinner. A few cast curious eyes to the head table, where one of the newcomers was chatting happily to Professor McGonagall in between feeding bits of Brussels sprout to his bird and the other was putting away several pounds of roast potatoes in between giving monosyllabic answers to Professor Dumbledore’s questions. Gossip fluttered and speculation flared, but for the moment the strangers were not as interesting as the pigs in blankets and certainly not as interesting as the trifle that followed.

  


* * *

  


“You might have mentioned the ghosts,” René said sharply, having slithered off his colleague’s arm and regained his form once they were alone in a guest suite later that evening.

He took his cigarette case from his pocket and glared at Professor Vogel and Professor Malinov, whom he knew by a variety of other aliases, among which were the fairly confident guesses of Theodor Ludwig and Mikhail Pavlovsky. 

There was admittedly no real sting to his glare. He was feeling the old thrill of having gotten into someplace he had no business being, and things were going well so far. However, it did not do to get cocky when one was about to rob the premier magical site in Britain. A dose of healthy pessimism was the best ward against the evil eye. Besides, their success was only proof of Hogwarts’ inferiority to his alma mater. If two assumed names and a few forged letters of reference had been enough to get them through the doors of Beauxbâtons, they would have been ejected on grounds of hygiene alone after that little demonstration with the pigeon.

Theodor, who was browsing the sitting room bookshelves like a child in a candy store, spared him a glance. "Didn’t I?"

"You did not,” René said, lighting a cigarette. “If you had, I wouldn't have bothered packing half a case of supplies for invisibility potions. What use are they when the place is full of spectral eyes?”

Theodor plucked a book from the shelf and began paging through it. "I'm quite certain I mentioned the ghosts."

“I quote,” René said, his hair darkening from silvered brown to black and his features rearranging themselves into the doctor’s, "'It won’t be any trouble. Teachers, students, portraits and such. The little...how are they called in English? Die Kobolde? You know what I mean. It would only be the usual people, hardly any security at all.’"

"Ha," Theodor said as if René had somehow proved his point. "'The usual people.’"

"Ghosts are not 'the usual people,'" René retorted.

"They used to be!"

René rolled his eyes and turned to Mikhail in appeal. Mikhail shrugged his massive shoulders in a way that suggested he agreed with René but was not stupid enough to wade into the argument. Grateful for at least one source of good sense in his life, René let the matter drop and sat down in an armchair. The guest suites they had been given were nothing to write home about, decorated with the usual medieval oak and velvet that passed for style over here. However, the fire was welcome, and this part of the floor was an acceptable distance from staff and student lodging. 

He spared a few discreet looks at his colleagues as he reinforced his nerves with a brief smoke, rather more appreciative of them than the decor. They had cleaned up nicely, having submitted to his greater experience with disguises. He had particularly enjoyed dressing up Mikhail in national costume, with that exquisite coat whose delicate embroidery only emphasised the powerful build underneath. Amidst nights of planning action, planning contingencies, and calling in favours to gather intelligence, there had been idle pleasure in finding just the right combination of leather, fur and tailoring to capture Mikhail’s union of dignity and ferocity. 

Theodor, in turn, looked every inch the stern professor and almost perversely priestly in those black robes with their neat rows of tiny buttons. Of course, he was likely the only one of them not entirely playing a part. René had never been able to prove it, but Theodor bore a certain resemblance to rumours of a young professor who had been dismissed from Durmstrang in the '50s and was wanted in three countries as a result. The exact charges were unclear, but phrases such as "overzealous experimentation," "lack of ethical oversight," and "it took a week to exorcise the laboratory" were recurring features.

"Anyway," Theodor said, gathering five more books from the shelves to make a stack, "ghosts are not guard dogs. They have their own business to dwell on. That is why they’re ghosts.”

"I will put out milk for kobolds," Mikhail added, reassembling an enormous crossbow from the pieces in his trunk. "Give them milk, they will not talk."

René retrieved his own bag from inside the trunk and removed from it a woodcut illustration photocopied from _Mystical Artefactes of Auld_ , which featured an ornately engraved cauldron from whose mouth arose the form of an ancient god. He laid the photocopy in the middle of the sitting room table. 

“Gentlemen,” he said, feeling the occasion called for a short speech, "I do not need to tell you that _this_ is why we are here. My sources all claim that the Cauldron of the Dagda was entrusted to Hogwarts for safekeeping in the early thirteenth century. If the legends are to be believed, this is an item of almost unimaginable power. Whatever is brewed inside it will be increased to meet the needs of the brewer, and some say it is the only vessel that can hold a true elixir to resurrect the dead. If it has not been destroyed or sold for scrap in the last seven hundred years, it is somewhere in this castle."

Theodor clasped his hands together in obvious delight. "Ach, I want it so much!"

René fought to suppress a smile. Theodor was completely insane, but there was something very endearing about his continued passion for his work. These past years had been strange ones for them all, their lives in the Gravel War disrupted first by an invasion of clockwork men and then their unwilling involvement in a century-old revenge plot. Then had come unprecedented peace and organization under the new leadership of their former handler. Suddenly the paperwork was all completed on time, hardly anyone was shooting at them, and all three had consultancy contracts and private offices.

It was a comfortable arrangement, and a lucrative one. Surely, René had often thought of late, this was what he was owed after all of his trials with the company now that he was a man firmly ensconced in middle age with a lower back that tended to twinge when he stabbed someone too vigorously. Yet he was glad to have been roped into Mikhail’s attempt to indulge the doctor. He could not recall the last time he’d had this much fun. 

The plan was simple enough. Theodor and Mikhail would maintain their cover and ensure they were observed by the staff and students as often as possible to allay suspicions. Meanwhile, René would be free to explore the school at his leisure by virtue of both his animagus and metamorphmagus abilities and the fact that no one knew he was even here. The rest was only fine details: blueprints and maps that they amended to reflect what they had so far observed of the castle and its environs, pre-prepared code words, escape protocols, and a list of rendezvous points that incinerated itself once they had all memorized it. 

A clock on the mantel declared it just short of midnight when Archimedes began tugging at his master’s hair, attempting to pigeon-peck him into bed. Theodor cast a glance at Mikhail, then removed his spectacles and pointedly rubbed his eyes.

"Go," René said tolerantly, gathering up the papers.

Theodor smiled and feigned a yawn for good measure. “Goodnight, Herr Spy. Goodnight, Herr Heavy.” 

He rose and stretched, and made a very creditable show of disinterested politeness as he stepped out to retire to the second suite next door. 

René waited for a silent count of three.

Mikhail rolled his shoulders, stood up, and nodded toward the bedroom. "Take. I will sleep on couch."

“Of course,” René said, pretending along with him that it would not be rendered into matchsticks and sawdust under a man Mikhail’s size. Then, because he was in a good mood, he generously gestured to the black bag Theodor had left behind. “But the doctor has forgotten his bag.”

It had taken years for him gain fluency in reading that stone face, but he caught the amusement in Mikhail's eye. "I will bring it to him."

"Good. I’m sure he won’t sleep without a scalpel to cuddle."

Mikhail left with all due discretion, and René sat watching the fire for several minutes. He ought to get to bed himself, he thought. It was best to get an early start if he wanted to find that cauldron before the week was up. Yet the momentum of a full day’s travel was not so easy to halt, not least with the cushion of warm camaraderie suddenly gone. Telling himself he was only going to make certain they were not secretly plotting to double-cross him, he shifted into his animagus form and slithered out under one door and in under another. 

The sitting room in the other suite was dark and cold, but René could see lamp light coming from the bedroom. He transformed back onto his feet and stood silently in the shadows.

“Misha,” Theodor said, his voice somewhere between amused and wheedling, “don’t be a bore, come to bed.” 

There was the rustle of clothing and a pair of thumps as boots hit the floor. This was followed by very faint sound that a connoisseur such as René could readily identify as a kiss. He heard a soft laugh and then a low grumble, the fondness of which elicited a pang that René opted to blame on the after-effects of taking the Floo in a form without inner ears. 

He was not so unprincipled in regard to his friends that he crept forward to watch as the sounds turned intimate. Yet he lingered for a few moments more, listening just long enough to have something to take back to bed with him.

  


* * *

  


“He _what?_ ”

"Invited a couple of foreigners around to paw through the books, didn't he," Argus Filch said with a combination of grim disapproval and private delight to have the opportunity to bear this news to Irma Pince the morning after the strangers’ arrival.

Although not generally holding with people from parts abroad, Filch had not yet formed a poor opinion of the visiting professors. The German one seemed respectable enough, a proper educator of the old school. He felt this could be surmised from the man's ramrod posture and the number of buttons he had on his sleeves. He also believed it would be a particularly stupid little brat indeed that would misbehave for that big Russian fellow. It was in fact Dumbledore who was the greatest source of his griping, feeling as he did that the headmaster never asked anyone who'd actually have to deal with all the cleaning-up-after before he went and invited guests.

Pince’s lips pruned as she peered at the two men who had set themselves up at a central study table. Her narrow shoulders stiffened in alarm when the bigger one picked up a dainty scroll of centuries-old vellum, but they relaxed little by little when he handled it with surprising delicacy given the enormity of his fingers.

She eventually sniffed. "He never even asked.”

"Why would he?" Filch said. "It's only your bloody library."

"Language, Argus,” she chided.

"I beg your pardon, Madam."

Keeping a close eye on the strangers, neither librarian nor caretaker noticed a green-and-black serpent slithering through the Restricted Section and into the locked storeroom beyond.

  


* * *

  


If the presence of ghosts and a tolerance for cannibalistic pigeons had not settled it, René felt that Hogwarts lost out to Beauxbâtons for this simple fact: his alma mater would not be so lackadaisical about letting someone as obviously up to no good as Theodor Ludwig wander the corridors. This point held despite the fact that Theodor Ludwig was, at the moment, him. 

René kept his belly low to the ground for the majority of his scouting, avoiding the many portraits and suits of armour. However, he could not move very fast as a snake and there were times when opposable thumbs or crossing a wide open space were a necessity. As a result, he had dressed in Theodor's spare robes and was careful to arrange his face to match whenever he needed to walk on two legs.

Mikhail would have been the better choice as a disguise. The man was far more likely to actually hold his post and not come blundering onto the scene as a doppelganger. Unfortunately, it already took a pair of lifts and shoulder pads for him to pass as Theodor, and he had never managed to feign being Mikhail for more than five minutes without dislocating his kneecaps. He would not have the protection of Mikhail's glowering silence and eloquent grunts, but if he was caught, he could always borrow Theodor’s tourist shtick and offer an apologetic smile and a self-deprecating "Ach, mein English..."

That always worked on Britons, who liked to believe that the rest of the continent was as unilingual as they were.

It also did not hurt that Theodor was oddly attractive in a way that was not diminishing as he grew older. He had a certain authority by way of his credentials, combined with an almost ditzy charm that had wound a sensible man like Mikhail around his little finger and to which even René was periodically susceptible. Knowing this was what saved him when an insistent attempt at picking a promising-looking lock was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps.

He stepped back from the door and feigned inspecting two paths of a forked corridor in indecision. 

"Professor Vogel, are you lost?" 

The interloper was a plump man of perhaps a decade older than René himself, whose cheerful expression very nearly looked genuine and whose moustache had gone out of style thirty years ago. “Slughorn, Horace” his memory provided, and while the man’s full attention was at first alarming, the way his gaze briefly flicked up and down René’s portrayal of Theodor’s form clarified matters.

René smiled with calculated obliviousness. "A little, ja. This school—so big!"

In a move René had perfected if not invented, Slughorn oozed closer and patted his arm. "Happens to the best of us, my dear man. I would be very happy to take you on a tour if you have nowhere pressing to be. My rooms aren't far from here, and as it happens I have a bottle of excellent Kirschwasser given to me by a dear friend you might know—I won’t say his name, but needless to say I’m sure you’ve read his work. Are you a brandy man?"

René further consulted his mental list. Slughorn was the Potions professor. This was likely a man who knew his cauldrons, and certainly one who wanted to impress his new friend. He lowered Theodor’s voice half an octave the way its owner usually did when presented with the sight of Mikhail working out or the prospect of non-consensual surgery. "Not on an empty stomach.”

Slughorn beamed and squeezed René’s arm. “You’re in luck. I lay a very good table.”

“By all means, lead the way,” René said brightly.

He had every intention of protecting Theodor's virtue, of course, but it had been so long since he had got to play the honeypot. This was far too good to pass up.

  


* * *

  


"They’re _what?_ "

"Death Eaters," James Potter said, keeping his back to the wall as he shuffled around the corner into the guest wing. “Obviously.”

"Professor Vogel and Professor Malinov?" Remus Lupin asked again, just to be sure. He understood now why James would not tell him what they were up to until he agreed to accompany them on this top-secret afternoon expedition. He would have come along either way, of course. They were his friends and had stayed his friends despite discovering his secret. He would have followed them all straight off the edge of a cliff if they had proposed it, but he nonetheless felt they might be getting a little old for these kind of make-believe games.

Sirius Black did not feel it was a game. "Think about it. They're from _Durmstrang_. I heard that's in the Black Forest. They sell hexspelled students to the hags for meat over there. And Malinov's got that snake, and there’s the way Vogel _smiles_..."

"He's got fangs," Peter Pettigrew chimed in loyally. "I've seen them."

Remus sighed. He refrained from mentioning that he was fairly certain Durmstrang was in Sweden and instead agreed to keep lookout at one end of the corridor while Sirius was posted at the other. Peter giddily began charming open the lock on one of the guest suites, with James standing over him supervising. Remus sometimes wondered, guiltily, if the only reason Peter was kept around was that he always said yes and was very good at getting into places. 

The lock soon clicked open, and the four boys stole inside the suite to have a look around. To their shared disappointment, no excitement immediately presented itself. There were no captive virgins to rescue and no obvious signs of strangeness like a coffin where the bed should be. There was in fact only a regular bed, neatly made but with a dark blue dressing gown thrown over the footboard. A pile of books sat on the bedside table, but they were all about herbology and potions and were judged by Sirius to be “dead boring.”

"That's funny," Remus said, looking at two pairs of slippers which seemed to him to be two different sizes. "Why do you think he's got—"

James interrupted him. "He left the key to his trunk!"

The boys quickly gathered around the big steamer trunk as if it were treasure chest. James fitted the key in the lock and turned it. Then, with a pause for dramatic effect, he lifted the lid. Four sets of held breath were released all at once. 

At first, the interior of the trunk looked disappointingly ordinary. There were several more books inside, as well as some writing paper, which might have been examined further if any of them could read German or recall the translation charm they had been taught last year. There was a box of quills and a spare pair of boots. A leather roll of scalpels seemed menacingly promising, but it was not really anything that Professor Slughorn did not keep for Potions. Likewise, the odd-looking saw they found, while wickedly sharp, seemed the sort of thing that someone who studied Snargaluff plants should have and failed to arouse more than a little speculation.

Then they found it. The box at the bottom of the trunk was just about big enough to hold a quaffle. It was made from well-polished ebony wood with shining silver hinges. The wood was carved all over with roses, but the kind with wickedly sharp thorns. While it fitted snugly shut, there was no lock on it. James opened it to reveal a lining of black velvet and a trove of evil-looking instruments.

"Manacles," James breathed, staring at the leather and steel.

"And gags," Sirius said, reaching out with his wand and prodding some sort of metal clamp. "And those are thumb screws, aren’t they?"

Peter reached right in pulled out something very strange. "What's this for?"

It looked rather like a black unicorn horn without a point. From the way it bobbed in Peter’s hand, it was obviously made of rubber. James frowned, and Sirius tilted his head to one side.

Remus, who had made the mistake last summer of looking under his parents’ bed, glanced uncertainly from the rubber thing to the other items in the box.

"I...don't think this is for torture."

The others took a second to catch up, and then all four of them scurried back from the trunk. Peter hurled the rubber thing back into the box and let out a cry of alarm when it bounced. He began frantically trying to wipe his hand off on the rug. Sirius threw the books and papers back in, hurriedly patting them into place. James slammed the lid of the trunk down and tossed the key back on top of the wardrobe. 

Red-faced and unsettled, the boys beat a hasty retreat back to Gryffindor Tower and vowed to never again speak of what they had seen.

  


* * *

  


"It's kept on the fourth floor in the north wing," René reported smugly that night as they gathered in his suite for debriefing and drink. “And Mikhail, try to look out of sorts the next time you see Professor Slughorn. ‘Professor Vogel’ had to tell him you’re the jealous type.”

Mikhail snorted. 

“The one with the moustache?” Theodor asked, putting two muffins in the toaster and slotting it back into the fire. He paused in consideration. “I would have.”

“You would have gone on a tangent about flesh-eating potions and he would have called in the aurors,” René countered, aware that Theodor would not have found Slughorn up to snuff and was likely only trying to reap the passionate rewards of Mikhail actually being the jealous type. 

Theodor gave an easy shrug that conceded this was so and topped up his wine glass. 

René had another bite of cold chicken. He wrinkled his nose. The food was yet another reason why Hogwarts could not measure up to Beauxbâtons. It had the slightly gummy consistency and off-puttingly even coloration of food that had been prepared by magic. God help him, he thought, he would even prefer some of Dell Conagher’s barbecue to this. Nonetheless, the two bottles of 1947 Cheval Noir he had accepted from Horace Slughorn were more than passable.

“Make a distraction tomorrow morning at a quarter past ten,” he said, experienced enough to know that smack-dab in the middle of other people’s daytime routine was more conducive to going unnoticed than the silence of the night. “Something that will need cleaning up. I will take care of the rest.”

There was no real reason for Theodor and Mikhail to stay over, René thought, but to his pleased surprise they seemed to find the wine as good as he did. A chess board was set up on the sitting room table, and the first of three games was soon underway. Mikhail played white and Theodor black, and René switched sides between them based on whim, murmuring suggestions to whomever looked to be losing and basking in the warmth of their company as much as in the firelight. 

It was good to see them together again, he reflected, aware of a certain tension in his chest that he decided to attribute to indigestion. He himself had ended more relationships than he could count, leaving behind nothing but an assumed name and what he hoped were pleasant memories. That was the nature of a life of intrigue and disguise. Yet Theodor and Mikhail had reconciled after parting ways—something René, despite his superior experience, had never managed. The two had found each other again after Mikhail’s return from Siberia, and they seemed all the stronger for it. Perhaps they were only settling, but as he watched them share their fond and comfortable silence across the chess board, he wondered briefly what else you were meant to do when the world was moving on and the young were increasingly loud and tiresome. 

He would remember, later, deciding to rest his eyes for a moment. He would not remember falling asleep on the sofa. His friends’ voices, low and quiet in occasional comment, were too familiar to wake him. He slept through the brief conversation about him, in which Theodor and Mikhail agreed that he seemed in better spirits than he had for months, and through the pair quietly rising, and through the careful touch of a hand on his head.

René did not in fact wake until morning, his shoes removed and Theodor’s cloak spread over him, blearily surfacing to the sound of Mikhail’s sonorous snoring in the adjacent bedroom.

  


* * *

  


"He's _what?_ "

Minerva McGonagall had been wading through the year-end accounting when Professor Northrup had burst into her office, pale and gibbering something about a guest lecture. His appearance was not initially received with any great alarm. McGonagall had been teaching at Hogwarts for nearly two decades, and while she liked Northrup perfectly well, it was a fact generally agreed upon that December was when it all started to go wrong for whichever unfortunate soul was holding the Defence Against the Dark Arts post that year.

She listened to his excited complaint, uttered the aforementioned exclamation, then demanded that he repeat himself with more coherency and fewer tears. He did so. When he had finished, she put down her quill and drew her wand. 

The two set off briskly to Northrup’s classroom, McGonagall leading the way and the ostensible Defence expert cringing behind her. Upon arrival, they found the classroom door shut and everything relatively quiet. This was not innately reassuring. 

McGonagall opened the door and took stock of the scene. Professor Vogel stood at the front of the room, lecturing pleasantly to a group of fourth-year Slytherins and Hufflepuffs. There was a very large hole in the floor, up from which shone an eerie red light. A portion of the class had flattened themselves against the far wall, wide-eyed with terror. One of the Slytherins, Severus Snape, sat entranced in the front row, madly scribbling notes and looking up at Professor Vogel through the curtain of his lank hair with the sort of worship he had certainly never demonstrated in his Transfiguration lessons.

Northrup whispered urgently in her ear.

"Professor Vogel," she snapped, "we do not teach _blood magic_ at this school!"

Vogel blinked in confusion. He glanced down at the desk where a crimson-splattered class timetable sat. He then looked back at her and Northrup with a polite frown, as though this might have only been a scheduling error. 

Finally, he ventured: "This is not the Dark Arts class?"

" _Defence_ Against the Dark Arts!"

Vogel seemed to give this thought, absently kicking at a clawed hand that was trying to lever itself out of the hole. Then he shrugged, offering a sunny smile as he put his knife down. “Well, the best defense is a strong offense, ja?” 

McGonagall felt a headache coming on that put the budget to shame. 

“Mr. Snape,” she said calmly. “Please go and find Headmaster Dumbledore—” 

She held up a hand before the boy could dart off.

“—and relinquish those notes to me, thank you.”

  


* * *

  


The irony was not lost on René when the sole obstacle to his successful theft of the Cauldron of the Dagda proved to be creeping vines. 

Had this been his alma mater, the irony would have been perfect enough to see him currently pinned to the wall by Snargaluff rather than Devil’s Snare. However, he was willing to give Hogwarts a grudging point of credit for having a security system so stupid and medieval that it could entrap any sensible gentleman-thief who had brought his best lock-picking and curse-breaking equipment in lieu of hedge clippers. 

It was late afternoon by his estimation when Theodor and Mikhail finally came looking for him. The threat of asphyxiation had passed and the threat of death from thirst was still some time away, which left only boredom, an increasingly urgent need to urinate, and an even more urgent need for a cigarette. 

“Congratulations,” he spat, nicotine-deprived and taunted by the cauldron sitting six feet away under cover of vines. “You haven’t found my corpse.”

“Ooh, Devil’s Snare!” Theodor, to René’s annoyance, leaned forward to coo at the waving tendrils. 

“He made distraction,” Mikhail said, carefully reaching into the gap between the vines and taking out René’s cigarette case for him. “Then many people wished to lecture him about this distraction.”

A cigarette settled between René’s lips, and the flick of his lighter in Mikhail’s hands at least sent some of the vines around his throat retreating. He took a long drag, which only sanded some of the edge off his pique. He might have missed it if he wasn’t held utterly immobile, but he would swear he saw Mikhail and Theodor exchange a very quick glance.

He narrowed his eyes and pushed the cigarette toward the corner of his mouth for safekeeping. "What was that look just now?"

The pair once again glanced at each other. 

“What look?” Mikhail was better at playing stupid, but René knew him too well to believe it.

His thoughts began turning very quickly. He glanced at the vine-covered cauldron, which seemed to hold less interest for Theodor than the vines themselves, then at Mikhail’s deliberately expressionless face, and finally back at Theodor.

“You have a seven-figure research budget, and I've seen you resurrect a man with two pints of armadillo blood and a golf cart battery. Why am I really here?"

Theodor attempted a smile and spread his hands helplessly. “Aheh. Well, I can boil my own coffee, ja? That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a percolator.”

“Try again,” René said, his voice as low and dangerous as he could creditably manage from his precarious position.

There was a third shared look between Theodor and Mikhail. This one was held for a moment and involved the sort of eyebrow-related semaphore that long-standing couples developed.

At the end of the transmission, Theodor sighed. “We thought it would cheer you up.”

Whatever René had been expecting, this was not it. "I beg your pardon?"

Theodor’s hands sketched an explanation on the air. "Well, with the war and all that excitement with the old woman over, you were always moping about. Not complaining as much as you used to. Smoking too much. You seemed so unhappy."

Mikhail nodded. “Yes. This.”

"So you...fabricated a heist," René said, hoping his tone relayed the fact that he was reconsidering his current mental ranking of colleagues from most stupid to least and they were at serious risk of both being outpaced by Tavish DeGroot. 

Theodor looked at Mikhail again. "I told you we should have just offered him sex."

René blinked.

Mikhail threw his hands in the air. "This is your idea for everything!"

“Ja, but you’re the one who is always saying he’s—”

“—Doktor, this is not—”

René quickly rallied and cleared his throat. 

The two abruptly shut up and turned back to him. René looked them both over with careful consideration, paying particular attention to the narrow space between them and gauging exactly how he would fit in it. He had another puff on his cigarette and gave an exactingly casual shrug.

“Perhaps this cheered me up.”

Both men brightened. Theodor adjusted his spectacles, and Mikhail stood up straighter.

“Plan A,” René declared, trying very hard not to smile lest he lose his cigarette and the upper hand. “You disentangle me from these vines and I will secure the cauldron and restore this room to what it looked like when I came in. We discreetly stow the cauldron in a secondary location. You two maintain your cover for the remainder of the week, and when it is time to go, we walk out with the cauldron and no one the wiser.”

“And Plan B?” Mikhail asked.

René let his gaze smoulder. “Plan B. You disentangle me from these vines and we perform what I believe our less sophisticated colleagues call a ‘Teufort Smash and Grab.’ We flee and instead spend the rest of our holiday having group sex in the finest hotel I can find.”

  


* * *

  


On December 18th of 1973, a large fire broke out on the fourth floor of the north wing at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Its exact causes were not recorded, but the kindling seemed to be comprised chiefly of a large amount of Devil’s Snare whose presence in a long-abandoned storeroom filled with nothing but old furniture was a puzzle to most of the staff who arrived to put out the blaze. 

Three figures were seen sprinting across the snowy grounds shortly before the fire was discovered. One was very large, another less so, and the third rather slim. All three carried a suspicious amount of luggage and were making a beeline for a boat that was waiting at the edge of the lake. 

This scene might have aroused suspicion and perhaps even raised an alarm, but it was observed only by a pair of the castle’s ghosts who, being ghosts and having little interest in the business of others, merely watched in silence for a time before returning to their ongoing conversation about winters they had known.


End file.
